QSS Faculty and Staff

Jin Woo Kim

Jin Woo Kim, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College, recently authored a Monkey Cage article on the effect of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh on political polarization in the United States. Kim's findings are based on an experiment using over 4,000 United States residents that was carried out via Amazon Mechanical Turk. He first surveyed his subjects in early October 2018 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating allegations that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault as a teenager. Kim then contacted his respondents a second time several days later, randomizing the timing of survey invitation so that half of the his participants responded to a follow-up survey before the Senate floor vote and the other half responded after. Results from the study indicate that the Kavanaugh confirmation vote polarized opinions toward the parties among women. Specifically, Republican-leaning women expressed greater interest in voting for Republicans and independent women expressed greater interest in voting for Democratic candidates after the confirmation vote (compared to before it took place).

Brendan Nyhan, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who has worked with Kim since he came to Dartmouth, also noted that Kim's findings provide important new evidence for how the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings helped to polarize opinion toward the Supreme Court. In his Monkey Cage article, Kim finds the gap in partisan approval of the Court increased by nine percentage points among men and 19 percentage points among women after the confirmation vote.

Despite concern that selective exposure to congenial sources drives partisans to disagree about even purely factual matters, existing empirical research finds little to mixed evidence that most Americans do seek out like-minded sources of information. In this paper, we suggest an alternative conceptualization of selective exposure; people choose when to pay attention to politics, instead of which ideological sources to follow, such that they avoid politics altogether in the times when they anticipate unpleasant information. We argue that presidential performance shapes such expectations, which would, in turn, create divergent overtime ebbs and flows in the levels of political engagement across partisan groups. Drawing on two multi-wave survey datasets, we find partisans display a lower level of political interest and media consumption during a politically disappointing period. Our findings suggest that that the stream of information that Democrats receive in the long run can be different from Republicans, even if partisans follow mostly central news sources.